The lists exist everywhere. Year-end magazine issues, film school syllabi, websites that generate them algorithmically. The same names appear with such regularity that they’ve stopped functioning as criticism and started functioning as furniture. Welles, Bergman, Fellini, Kubrick, Kurosawa. You already know the list before you open it. And because you already know it, you stop asking why those names belong there, or whether they’ve crowded out names that belong there just as much.
What I’m after is something different. Not a ranking, which implies a competition with a single winner, and not a survey, which implies completeness neither I nor anyone else can deliver. I want to answer a specific question: which directors gave cinema something it didn’t have before them? What, exactly, did they add to what the medium could do?
That question cuts some famous names down and elevates others that most lists walk right past.
Start with Alfred Hitchcock, because he is on every list and belongs on every list, but not for the reasons usually given. Hitchcock isn’t great because he made great films, though he did: “Rear Window” (1954), “Vertigo” (1958), “Psycho” (1960), “The Birds” (1963). He belongs on this list because he discovered something about the human nervous system and built a language for activating it. The shower scene in “Psycho” is the clearest demonstration. In the studio era I’ve written about here, editing was primarily assembly: you cut from one thing to the next to advance a scene. Hitchcock used editing to generate states in the audience’s body. There is no shot in the “Psycho” shower sequence of a knife entering flesh, and the audience sees a murder. That gap between what the image shows and what the mind fills in is the discovery. He proved that implication is more powerful than explicit depiction, and every suspense filmmaker working today is living inside that discovery whether they know it or not.
Akira Kurosawa gave cinema the grammar of physical space. “Seven Samurai” in 1954. “Rashomon” in 1950. What Kurosawa understood, and what most directors before him only approximated, is that how a human being is placed within the frame carries meaning before a single line of dialogue is spoken. His compositions communicate power, vulnerability, the changing distance between people, all without words. The mud in the final battle of “Seven Samurai” isn’t atmosphere. It is the argument of the film: these men are dying for a village they can’t belong to. Sam Peckinpah learned this. Sergio Leone studied it. George Lucas has acknowledged that “The Hidden Fortress” (1958) was directly in his head when he made “Star Wars.” The influence spread because the principle is correct: what the frame contains, and where things sit within it, aren’t staging decisions. They are the film.
Robert Altman is a name that appears on some lists and not enough of them. What Altman gave cinema was the acoustic texture of real gatherings. “Nashville” in 1975, twenty-four characters with no single protagonist, a country music industry as the setting for a film that is actually about American self-delusion. What makes it strange is that the camera wanders, the conversations overlap, the music bleeds from one scene into the next, and you feel like you are at the party rather than watching it from outside. Before Altman, a film had a center of gravity: someone the story orbited around. Altman proved you could make a film about a system, about a cultural moment, without a protagonist, and the result is more like standing in a crowded room than watching a movie. “Short Cuts” in 1993 does the same thing with Raymond Carver stories and a sprawling Los Angeles cast. The technique isn’t a trick. It’s a discovery about how people actually share space, and how cinema can honor that without tidying it up.
Here are two directors most lists walk right past, and I want to spend some time with both of them.
Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” from 1975 is three hours and twenty minutes long, and for most of that running time a Belgian housewife makes dinner, cleans her apartment, and waits for her son to come home. No score. Stationary camera. You watch her peel potatoes in something close to real time. What Akerman understood is that duration is content, that the patience the film requires isn’t a tax on the viewer but the entire argument. When the routine finally breaks, in the film’s closing minutes, the effect is unlike anything else in cinema because you’ve been inside the routine long enough to feel its full weight. No director before Akerman had used time with that deliberateness. She isn’t easy. She is essential. Her influence on Kelly Reichardt, Andrea Arnold, and a dozen other filmmakers who have since worked with long takes, still cameras, and domestic space as subject is direct and underacknowledged.
Charles Burnett made “Killer of Sheep” in 1978, shooting on weekends in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles on a student film budget with non-professional actors and no conventional plot. The film follows a slaughterhouse worker named Stan and his family through a series of moments: a failed car repair, children playing on rooftops, a father who can’t sleep. It had scattered festival screenings but no commercial release until 2007, by which point the Library of Congress had already added it to the National Film Registry. Burnett is the filmmaker most canonical lists leave entirely off. He worked without studio support, without festival machinery, without any of the apparatus that gets a name into the conversation. What he produced is one of the most fully realized portraits of Black working-class American life in the history of the medium, and he produced it the way Italian neorealism produced its best work: by taking the camera to where people actually lived and paying close attention. There is a direct line from Burnett to Sean Baker, and it runs through every personal American film made outside the studio system in the decades between them.
Agnes Varda changed what a documentary could do with its own maker. “The Gleaners and I” (2000) found her wandering France with a small digital camera, filming people who collect what others leave behind: dropped potatoes after the harvest, discarded furniture, leftover food from the market. She put herself inside the film. She filmed her own aging hands. She connected her subject, gleaning and making use of what others discard, to her own late-career practice as a filmmaker collecting images. Before Varda, documentary was mostly understood as a camera pointed at something outside the filmmaker. Varda showed that the filmmaker’s presence could be the subject, that the act of looking and the person doing the looking are inseparable. “Cleo from 5 to 7” (1962) did something related with fiction: a young woman walks through Paris in something close to real time, waiting for a medical diagnosis, and the city becomes a conversation about what it means to inhabit a life you’re not sure will continue. Varda’s influence is in virtually every documentary made today, including the ones made by people who haven’t seen her films. The idea that a filmmaker can be inside what she’s making, that presence isn’t a corruption of objectivity but an honesty about the absence of it, that’s hers.
Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” in 1960 did something to editing that film never fully recovered from, which is a compliment. The jump cut, a jarring ellision within a continuous shot that removes time and says plainly that the film knows it is a film, wasn’t a mistake. It was a declaration that the pretense of seamlessness was a kind of lie. Characters in his later “Vivre sa Vie” (1962) speak directly to the camera. What the French New Wave took from neorealism and ran with was the freedom to be honest about construction, to let the seams show and make the seams mean something. The self-consciousness Godard introduced is now so thoroughly absorbed into the grammar of cinema, advertising, music video, streaming content, that we’ve stopped seeing it as his contribution. That invisibility is the measure of how completely he changed the medium.
Spike Lee added to American cinema something it had been refusing for most of its history: a visual and acoustic language for Black American life that owed nothing to how Hollywood had previously represented it. “Do the Right Thing” in 1989 is the break. The canted angles, the direct-to-camera address, the way the camera in the Bedford-Stuyvesant summer heat moves like a body that is already angry, the way the film refuses to tell you how to feel about what just happened. Lee brought craft, serious craft, to a perspective that American cinema had either ignored or flattened into familiar types. He is still working: “BlacKkKlansman” in 2018, “Da 5 Bloods” in 2020. The argument he has been making since “She’s Gotta Have It” in 1986 is the same argument throughout, which is that who the camera takes seriously, whose life the frame inhabits, whose anger is treated as legitimate, aren’t neutral choices. He was right in 1986 and he is still right.
Wong Kar-wai is the director whose absence from most English-language best-of lists tells you most about what those lists are actually measuring. “In the Mood for Love” (2000) is a film about two people in 1960s Hong Kong who suspect their spouses of having an affair with each other, and who begin to meet in stairwells and noodle shops to rehearse conversations they’ll never have. The plot is almost beside the point. What Wong does with this material is make memory the film’s actual subject: the way time feels when you are inside a moment you already know you’ll regret losing. The slow motion, Tony Leung’s face, Maggie Cheung in her cheongsams, the music that arrives like something half-remembered, none of this is style for its own sake. It is an argument that some human experiences can’t be narrated, only felt, and that cinema’s job in those cases is to put the feeling inside the viewer rather than describe it from the outside. “Chungking Express” (1994), “Happy Together” (1997), “2046” (2004). He isn’t a storyteller in the conventional sense. He is something harder to name and more lasting.
What the directors on this list have in common is that they answered questions the cinema wasn’t yet asking. Hitchcock asked what the cut can do to a nervous system. Kurosawa asked what the frame contains and why that matters. Akerman asked how long you are willing to pay attention before duration becomes its own meaning. Burnett asked whose life is worth this much camera. Varda asked whether the maker can be part of what is made. Lee asked who the cinema is actually for. Wong asked what it feels like to carry something you can’t put down.
Sean Baker, working right now, is asking some of the same questions. So are Kelly Reichardt, Celine Sciamma, and a dozen others whose names aren’t yet on any canonical list. That’s the conversation that doesn’t stop. What cinema was and what it is becoming are the same project, still unfinished, still worth showing up for. You don’t need to have seen everything to find your way in. You just need a name and a free evening.
Start anywhere on this list. The work is still there.
